All Categories

ROSIE

3/11/2019

Late last fall we visited a superb traveling exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan called “Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt, and the Four Freedoms.”

In late 1940, against the backdrop of a long-simmering war that was starting to boil over, President Franklin D Roosevelt was preparing for his upcoming State of the Union address, struggling to find a way to express his longstanding conviction that the our response to any world crisis, whatever it might be, should not be simply an expression of fear. (“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he had famously said in 1932, speaking not of war but of the Great Depression.)

Then, on January 1, 1941, while crafting his third draft of his message to Congress, Roosevelt was struck by what he believed to be an inspired way of encapsulating his vision for both America and the world - that is, by enumerating what he called “The Four Freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The peroration he dictated to his secretary at that moment was retained almost verbatim in the actual speech five days later.

How disappointed Roosevelt must have been, then, when the major American newspapers, while covering the address in detail, pretty much ignored the four freedoms passage. Even after the US entered the War in December of 1941, polling results showed that although 80% of Americans responded favorably to the underlying ideals, fewer than 25% could name even one of Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”, and 61% had never even heard of the four freedoms at all. As a catchy slogan Americans could unite behind, the four freedoms were a nonstarter.

"The Four Freedoms" on display at Camp Atterbury.

And then, almost miraculously, the four freedoms were rescued from the dustbin of history by the painter Norman Rockwell, who, wanting to do his part to support the war effort, retired to his studio in Arlington, Vermont in 1942 and in the space of seven months translated the four freedoms into four compelling images. Although the subject matter was taken from the everyday life of small-town America, they were in many ways aspirational rather than realistic. As Rockwell knew well, not all Americans enjoyed all four freedoms and some enjoyed none. Nonetheless, the scenes were recognizable to all, and the four freedoms, so abstract in Roosevelt’s words, became memorable in Rockwell’s hands.

Images and descriptions of these beloved paintings can be seen here. They appeared as covers on four consecutive weeks of the Saturday Evening Post in February and March of 1943, as well as on posters issued by the US Government Printing Office and on postage stamps. A photograph in the Camp Atterbury, Indiana Archives dated April 12. 1943, showing a WAC and a soldier flanking a four-freedoms poster, suggests that they were widely distributed on military bases (likely including Camp Evans).

* * * * *

Although the Four Freedoms paintings were the centerpiece of the exhibit, it encompassed much, much more, covering Rockwell’s growing commitment to contributing to the War effort in a meaningful way, and later to the advancement of civil rights. The work of other artists and writers also appeared, along with photographs and an evocative assortment of memorabilia.

As I wandered through the aisles, I felt sure there was a blog post here. After all, Rockwell’s fame as an artist/illustrator peaked between 1941-1946. My parents subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post, for which Rockwell created more than 300 cover illustrations over the course of his 47 year association with the publication. I remember looking forward to each issue as soon as I was old enough to read, always hoping Norman Rockwell’s instantly recognizable work would be featured on the cover, since I enjoyed both the visual humor and the satisfying sensation of “getting it.” And yet I can’t recall any specific discussions of Norman Rockwell, and when I polled my siblings, neither could they. I can only conclude that Norman Rockwell was so much part of the water we swam in, the air we breathed, that his work was too familiar and omnipresent to be worthy of comment.

* * * * *

The Four Freedoms were in some ways a turning point in Rockwell’s work, transforming him from an illustrator for whom the war effort was simply something he had to capture as part of his weekly deliverable to a painter with a much more ideological commitment and a will to determine how he could use his special gifts to contribute to that effort. A fire in his studio at around that time destroying all his irreplaceable costumes and props provided him with an additional impetus to focus on contemporary issues.

One outcome of all this introspection was Rockwell’s focus on a series of “characters” who came to stand for the American “can do” response to wartime mobilization. Perhaps the most notable was Private Willie Gillis, who appeared on several Post covers. Another, painted not long after the Four Freedoms tetralogy, was Rosie the Riveter, who appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post on May 29, 1943.

I always loved the idea of Rosie because of what she represented - a woman who, when the men were called away to fight a war, willingly did the work of the world, supplying both wartime needs and what was needed on the home front, and was paid for it. But no matter how often she was admonished that once the War was over she would have to cede her job to a returning serviceman who needed the work to support his family, that genie could never quite be put back in the bottle, and Rosie unexpectedly turned into an agent of radical social change.

Rose Balaban LaMay Stodola (1921-2017)

I also felt a special affinity with Rosie for a more personal reason: In 1968, my widowed father married a woman who had actually been a Rosie. My stepmother Rose (yes, that was really her name) was a gifted pianist who as a young woman had performed in Carnegie Hall; but when the War broke out she went to work as a welder at Grumman Aircraft on Long Island. After the War she resumed her musical career, working as a music teacher in the Suffolk County School System, but she always enjoyed talking about her service as a real live “Rosie.” Rose was a kind-hearted and good-humored woman, not unlike my mother; she nursed my father throughout his final years as he sank deeper and deeper into the fog of Alzheimer’s, and for this I shall always be grateful.

So imagine my surprise, as a self-professed Rosie buff, to learn at the Rockwell exhibit that 1) Norman Rockwell had painted an enormously popular picture of Rosie the Riveter, with which I was completely unfamiliar; and 2) the image I and most others knew as Rosie was not the one Rockwell had painted and was possibly not even Rosie.

How could this be?

* * * * *

Norman Rockwell's Rosie the Riveter (1943)

The answer is that “Rosie the Riveter” actually started out as a song, written in 1942 by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb. There was no real-life Rosie; or perhaps more accurately there were thousands. As Robert Lissauer, a business partner of Loeb’s, later recounted, “They wanted to write a song about women who were working for the war effort for the country. So they just made up the name ‘Rosie the Riveter.’ You pick a name for the alliteration and you go ahead and write it.” The song was recorded by numerous artists; one, by the big band leader Kay Kyser, became a national hit.

The song inspired a number of paintings, of which Rockwell’s was the most popular and widely known at the time, but far from the only one. Rockwell’s Rosie wore a blue jumpsuit, with a rivet gun in her lap, a sandwich in her hand, and a copy of Mein Kampf beneath her foot. Her lunchbox was labeled “Rosie,” a backlink to the popular song by Evans and Loeb. Rockwell’s Rosie had red hair and was so hefty and muscular that Rockwell felt he had to apologize to his neighbor Mary Doyle, a much more petite woman who had served as his model.

The painting behind me in the upper right is the one now celebrated as Rosie.

Among the many other contemporary Rosie and Rosie-ish images was the one with which we are most familiar today, a determined woman with her dark hair swept back by a polkadot bandanna and flexing her biceps, with a text balloon asserting, “We Can Do It!” This image, painted by a young artist named J. Howard Miller, was commissioned by Westinghouse Electric Corporation in 1943 as part of a series of posters boosting support for the war effort on the home front. It was displayed for a couple of weeks in factories in Pennsylvania and the Midwest, then replaced by the next-up poster. Fewer than 1,800 copies were printed.

It is not clear that the woman depicted in Miller's poster was ever intended to represent anything other than a generic woman who should be welcomed - temporarily - into the workforce, an idea that met with considerable opposition despite the obvious need for many extra pairs of hands. Nothing on the poster identifies the woman as Rosie or hints that her job was riveting (as opposed to welding or even mopping floors) - though the popularity of the Evans and Loeb song probably made Rosie spring to the minds of many viewers.

And there things stood for decades, until circumstances conspired to create a need for a heroine like Rosie. The 1980s marked the start of 40th anniversary celebrations of World War II (including my father’s largely unsuccessful attempt to commemorate Project Diana in 1986). It was also the time in which the second wave of feminism was winding down, having for the most part (with the glaring exception of its failure to pass the Equal Rights Amendment) met its goals, and many women were encouraged by the legislative and social victories their efforts had brought about. The National Archives, faced with the budget cuts of the Reagan era and looking for a way to generate income by capitalizing on both World War II nostalgia and the feminist wave, somehow hit upon the Miller image, licensed it, and plastered it on tee-shirts, mugs, and other souvenirs. And the crowd went wild!

Although licensing Rockwell’s Rosie would have been a much more expensive proposition, there are probably additional reasons why his painting was passed over for this campaign. Miller’s portrait, more feminine than Rockwell’s, was less likely to create uneasiness around the issue of gender bending. The Miller painting is also less of a period piece; “We Can Do It,” though at the time it implied “win the war,” translates more fluidly to the hope of achieving other goals than does the symbolism of Rosie tromping on Mein Kampf. The choice of Miller’s painting, far from being obvious, was a stroke of genius. Its moment had arrived.

What is harder to fathom is the alchemy by which Miller’s painting came to occupy Rosie’s identity, probably displacing Rockwell’s Rosie for all time.

* * * * *

So here are a couple of my faves from the Four Freedoms exhibit:

The Marble Champion (1939)

Back to Civvies (1945)

More or less bookending the War era, these paintings both appeal to me for their engaging portrayal of youth. "The Marble Champion" shows a girl ready not only to compete with the boys but to win; with her red hair and resolute expression, she could have been a young Rosie the Riveter. "Back to Civvies" is to me a poignant reminder of how very young were the still-growing boys sent off to do battle on faraway shores.

2 Comments

JACK DEWITT: "A LUNAR LOVE AFFAIR"

2/21/2019

0 Comments

John Hibbett DeWitt, Jr was many things to many people over the course of his nearly 93 years:

He was Nashville through and through, from his birth on February 20, 1906 to his death on January 22, 1999. His father was a judge in the Tennessee State Court of Appeals. He later attended Vanderbilt University and, after an interruption in 1929 to work in Bell Labs in Washington DC, in those days sort of a quasi-graduate school for aspiring engineers, he returned to complete his degree. For the rest of his life, he left Nashville only when he was needed elsewhere, and always returned when it became possible to do so.

Jack DeWitt at WSM, standing 4th from left (Grand Ole Opry Archives)

He was a seminal figure in the Golden Age of Radio. In 1922, at the age of 16, he drew on his skills as an amateur radio operator (N4CBC) to launch Nashville’s first broadcasting station in his parents' living room - the 15-watt WDAA, commissioned by the Ward-Belmont school for advertising purposes. WDAA lasted about a year. He then took on a much more ambitious project when he helped install the transmitter for WSM, Nashville’s first commercial radio station, which took its name from the slogan of its sponsor, the National Life and Accident Insurance Company, "We Shield Millions.” WSM first signed on in October of 1925 and a couple of months later introduced the show that would make Nashville and country music famous around the world, the Grand Ole Opry, now approaching its 95th year on the air. In 1932, after another stint at Bell Labs (now in New York), he returned to Nashville to become chief engineer at WSM. where he oversaw installation of its new 878-foot tower and 50 Kw transmitter, operating on a clear channel of 650 kHz (meaning that no other station in the country could share that frequency). After sundown under good conditions, WSM's AM signal can "skip" across the ionosphere, reaching perhaps 35 states. The cultural impact of bringing live country music and the diverse performers who made it into living rooms across America, if only for an hour a week, can hardly be overstated. From 1947 until his retirement in 1968, he served as President of WSM AM, FM, and TV. In an innovation that was pure DeWitt, WSM was the first TV station in the US to broadcast near-real time weather satellite photographs.

He was passionate about astronomy, an interest solidified in 1934 when he and his brother Ward built a 12-inch Cassegrain telescope, grinding the mirror themselves. In 1947, upon his return to Nashville following completion of his mission at Camp Evans, he built a dry-ice refrigerated photoelectric photometer that subsequently served as the basis for many Vanderbilt masters’ theses, bringing photoelectric photometry to Nashville and indeed to the whole Southern US. Although I and others think of him as first and foremost a radio man, the American Astronomical Society regards hims as one of their own, stating in their obituary that “the world lost a pioneering astronomer."

At least temporarily, he was a military man - though perhaps less in the tradition of stoic and unquestioning obedience than in the macho Chuck Yeager tradition of having the “right stuff.” When WWII broke out, he left WSM and his beloved Nashville to answer the call of duty and join the Army, becoming a pioneer in the development of RADAR (an acronym only coined in 1940) when he was assigned to the Evans Signal Laboratory of the US Army in Belmar NJ. By 1943, at the age of 37, he had become Director of the Signal Laboratory, supervising the work of many thousands at employees at the height of WWII.

And on January 10, 1946, he accomplished the goal for which he will always be best remembered, when the Project Diana team he assembled after the War ended successfully bounced radar waves off the moon.

* * * * *

Jack DeWitt and King Stodola, meeting and greeting visiting dignitaries who came to verify DeWitt's moonbounce claims, on a cold January day in 1946.

To my father, Jack DeWitt was both friend and hero - two roles seldom combined in one and the same person. But perhaps most importantly, considering the circumstances that brought them together, he was a good boss:

“Col DeWitt was director of the Laboratory,” my father wrote in a letter in January of 1986 (hoping - in vain - to interest a reporter in a 40th anniversary feature on Project Diana), “but he was no figurehead participant; he was the conceiver of the project and had undertaken trying to perform the experiment before he entered the Army - his original experiment failed because of known equipment inadequacies; he is a skilled engineer and his extensive participation was essential to the project’s success.”

The feeling must have been mutual, for of the 1,200 or so employees remaining at Camp Evans by 1946 - about 70 officers, the rest (like my father) civilians - he chose an elite team of five experienced radar engineers and of those, selected my father to serve as scientific leader. As I observed in an earlier post, my dad was just the sort of man Jack DeWitt would like and respect - "an engineer with good social skills and expertise in moving target detection (in this case a very large moving target). His approach to everything, from household repairs to shooting the moon, reflected the can-do spirit that Americans brought to World War II - work rapidly and intensively, use and modify materials already on hand, and then test, test, test." They also shared a connection to the state of Tennessee - DeWitt as a lifelong resident, my father, who resided there during his middle school years, when many of his adult interests developed.

At any rate, the two men clearly worked superbly well together and forged a lasting bond, remaining in touch with one another until my father's death in 1992. I never heard my father speak of him with anything but the greatest affection.

* * * * *

The title of this post, "A Lunar Love Affair," was taken from an overview of Project Diana by Trevor Clark that appeared in the IEEE Spectrum in May, 1980. The love affair began in earnest during the three years he spent at Bell Labs between 1929 and 1932, when he became deeply engrossed in the study of astronomy - even then with a special fascination for the moon. When he returned to Nashville, as noted above, he found that his brother Ward had also been bitten by the astronomy bug, and the two built a telescope together which they undoubtedly aimed at the moon.

As early as 1935, he attempted unsuccessfully to receive noise from the then newly-discovered Milky Way. Nothing daunted, he continued thinking about extraterrestrial communication, and by 1940, more specifically about the moon. On May 21, he famously wrote in his notebook: "It occurred to me that it might be possible to reflect ultrashort waves from the moon. If this could be done, it would open up wide possibilities for the study of the upper atmosphere. So far as I know, no one has ever sent waves off the Earth and measured their return through the entire atmosphere of the Earth." He went on to describe his attempt the previous evening to reflect 138 MHz (2-meter) radio waves off the moon, using an 80-watt transmitter and receiver he had developed and built for radio station WGN in Chicago. The experiment failed.

Fate handed DeWitt a second chance to attempt a moonbounce in 1945, when his demobilization was delayed for several months after World War II ended. He quickly assembled a small team of his most skilled engineers and gave them access to all of Camp Evans' resources, including in the Laboratory's Theoretical Studies Group (in particular the mathematician and astrophysicist Dr. Walter McAfee, without whose elegant computations of the velocity of a position on the moon relative to a position on earth, the project could not have succeeded), the Antenna and Mechanical Design Group, and others.

It was DeWitt who christened the experiment Project Diana, after the Roman goddess of the Moon, stating a little crudely, "the Greek [sic] mythology books said that she had never been cracked." His choice led to the American tradition, which continues to this day, of naming space missions after figures from ancient mythology.

To Jack DeWitt, failures were just speed bumps on the road to success. He thought about his "negative result" in 1940 and carefully considered how his little team could modify equipment already on hand - time was of the essence and funds were limited - to improve their chances of succeeding. The antenna and Dr McAfee's calculations needed to compensate for Doppler shift have been described elsewhere in this blog. To address the problem to which he primarily attributed his previous failure, insufficient receiver sensitivity, DeWitt settled on a crystal-controlled receiver and transmitter specially designed for the Signal Corps by radio pioneer Edwin H. Armstrong, to improve frequency stability. "We realized that the moon echoes would be very weak," he later recalled, "so we had to use a very narrow receiver bandwidth to reduce thermal noise to tolerable levels." They chose a wavelength of 2.7 meters - short enough, they believed, to penetrate the ionosphere.

Initial efforts to hit the moon were frustrated repeatedly, by dodgy equipment and possibly (as later suggested by team member Dr. Harold Webb) by their ignorance of a phenomenon known as the Faraday effect, which could cause the signals to be rotated as they passed through the ionosphere and escape detection.

Finally, on January 10, 1946, it all came together. The first signal was broadcast just before noon, and 2.5 seconds later - the amount of time required for a round trip of about 500,000 miles - the echoes lit up a 9" cathode-ray tube and produced an 180 Hz beep amplified by a loud speaker. Minutes later, when the moon moved out of range, testing ended for the day. Although the source of the echoes was inferential, DeWitt later remarked that it had to be the moon "because there was nothing else there but the moon."

Ironically, DeWitt himself wasn't present on that fateful day. "I was over in Belmar," he confessed later, "having lunch and picking up some items like cigarettes at the drug store (stopped smoking 1952 thank God)." Testing was repeated daily for the next 3 days, however, and then on eight additional days during the month, so he eventually had ample opportunity to enjoy the fulfillment of his dream.

The equipment, however, remained "haywire," as DeWitt put it, and some of the media excitement that followed was actually based on simulations, recordings, and scripted interviews. When a couple of prominent colleagues from the MIT Radiation Laboratory arrived to observe a test carried out under my father's direction, what happened was...nothing. As DeWitt recounted the story later, "You can imagine that at this point I was dying. Shortly a big truck passed by on the road next to the equipment and immediately the echoes popped up. I will always believe that one of the crystals was not oscillating until it was shaken up or there was a loose connection which fixed itself." Cheers erupted from the bystanders.

Such a project clearly needed a military justification, and DeWitt found it in a directive from the Army's Chief Signal Officer to develop radars capable of detecting missiles coming from the Soviet Union. Since no such missiles were available for tests, DeWitt argued, the Moon could serve as a handy stand-in. But DeWitt himself was more interested in its potential for space exploration, and radio man that he was, in the project's implications for communication. In his visionary notes of 1940, he wrote "There are times when communication by this method might be extremely valuable such as during magnetic storms and daytime radio "blackouts". This may provide a means in the future of bringing television programs over long distances, such as across the oceans." According to Harold Webb, Project Diana's potential for communication was still his obsession in 1945: "He thought TV signals could be bounced off the moon and spread to one-half the earth." Nary a word about its military implications was spoken, at least to those with whom he worked most closely.

* * * * *

A brief postscript: Anyone who has followed this blog will not be surprised to learn that DeWitt shared with many of his fellow radio engineers, including Armstrong himself and of course my father, a fascination with towers - and the bigger the better.

In 1928, WSM was assigned the frequency of 650 kHz, giving it membership in the highly select club of Class 1-A clear-channel broadcasters. To take advantage of all this power and obtain nationwide coverage, the station under DeWitt's supervision erected an unusual diamond-shaped vertical tower (manufactured by Blaw-Knox) in 1932 to support the station's new 50,000-watt transmitter. Topping out at 878 feet, it was at that time the tallest antenna in North America. DeWitt and his crew of engineers soon noticed that the tower was actually causing self-cancellation in its "fringe" reception areas, keeping it from reaching fans in Chattanooga and Knoxville, and in 1939 it was trimmed to a mere 808 feet. It is now known that the optimal height for a Class A station on that frequency is about 810 feet, so - close enough. The lopped-off portion was recycled as a flagpole at a nearby school, where it remained for more than 50 years.

During World War II, the tower was assigned to service as a backup relay station for transmissions to submarines should ship-to-shore communication be lost.

The tower, still standing proud just south of Nashville in Brentwood, has been designated a National Engineering Landmark and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. In 2001, when the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum moved to a new facility in the heart of downtown Nashville's arts and entertainment district, its design incorporated a replica of the distinctive diamond-shaped tower on top of the Rotunda, in recognition of WSM's revered place in country music history - thanks in no small part to its tower. It is among the oldest operating broadcast towers still in use, and for tower-philes everywhere, a must-see.

0 Comments

SPOOKY CAMP EVANS

10/30/2018

0 Comments

Hallowe’en is a big deal at InfoAge.

Director Fred Carl and his band of enthusiastic volunteers have made great progress in taming and refurbishing the interior spaces, including some truly stunning exhibits - space exploration, of course, but also World Wars I and II, vintage computers, shipwrecks, model railroads, and military technology, to name a few.

The grounds, however, are still largely frozen in time, dotted with an assortment of mobile radar units, jeeps, and outbuildings ranging from the merely quirky to the downright bizarre.

Making a virtue of necessity, InfoAge has embraced its own spookiness by turning the run-up to Hallowe’en into a month-long fear-fest. Every Friday and Saturday of October, from 7-11pm, Camp Evans Base of Terror (CEBOT) is open for business. It’s the major fund-raiser of the year.

* * * * *

When my husband and I traveled to New Jersey in August of 2017 to celebrate my father’s election to the InfoAge Wall of Fame, we devoted an afternoon to an unofficial self-guided tour of the grounds. Fortunately the campus is open to the public whenever nothing else is going on, and no one seemed to mind if we wandered around staring and taking photographs .

All around us were the ghosts of Hallowe’ens past - both the mysterious ruined structures and props created for CEBOT events.

Top billing in the annual Hallowe'en extravaganzas deservedly goes to Camp Evans' unique collection of Dymaxion Deployment Units or DDU's, small yurt-like structures designed by Buckminster Fuller.

Along with the Beatles, Ravi Shankar, Marshall McLuhan, Woodstock, and psychedelia, Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller was part of the interior landscape of my generation. It was he who popularized the geodesic dome, a distinctive hemispherical shape composed of triangular surfaces that distribute structural stress to maximize strength and stability. The geodesic dome was the darling of not one but two World's Fairs, in New York in 1964 and Montreal in 1967.

Not until I wrote a blog post on Buckminster Fulle r, however, did I learn about his earlier work, before the geodesic dome catapulted him to fame, and about the dymaxion concept - dynamic, maximum, and tension - which Fuller applied to a whole spectrum of creations ranging from dwellings to maps to sleep-wake cycles, all sharing the goal of achieving “maximum gain of advantage from minimal energy input."

The DDU was the only Dymaxion concept that ever came close to being mass-produced - if double or low-triple digits can be called mass-produced. Yet ironically it was in some ways more Dymaxion in name than in fact, having as much in common with the corrugated sheet metal grain bins it was modeled on as with the much more elaborate and sophisticated Dymaxion house. Still, it filled a wartime need for cheap, sturdy, easily assembled portable structures that could be used as houses, emergency shelters, and specialized work spaces, and it might have enjoyed even greater success had not the wartime demand for steel brought production to a halt. Between 1941 and 1943, around 28 DDU’s were ordered and installed on circular concrete pads at Camp Evans where they were used for conducting hazardous procedures or for storage.

I have no idea what Fred actually said when he first encountered these odd yurt-like structures in the early 1990s, but it must have been something along the lines of “What the heck are these?” It wasn’t till 1996 that the mystery was finally solved, with the completion of an historic resources study conducted by the Department of Defense.

When the campus was divided between InfoAge and the Wall branch of Brookdale Community College, the DDUs that were on the Brookdale property were disposed of. At this point only a fraction of the original structures remain, but the InfoAge collection is still probably the largest assemblage of DDUs anywhere in the world. A 2013 NYTimes article spoke of twelve, but I only counted eleven during our visit.

Unfortunately, most of the survivors are in serious disrepair. One can only hope that funds will be found to preserve and restore these historic treasures.

* * * * *

Hallowe'en is also a big deal for the history of Project Diana and for this blog because it's the 104th anniversary of the birth of E. King Stodola. Here he is with his little brother Quentin; I'm not sure it was actually Hallowe'en but both boys are in costume so - close enough. Happy birthday, Dad, I miss you!

0 Comments

MY FATHER'S BRUSH WITH LITERARY HISTORY

10/2/2018

0 Comments

Shortly before my uncle Quentin was born in 1918, when my father was around 4 years old, his family left Brooklyn and moved to the Boston area, where they lived for several years in a series of apartments in a cluster of Boston suburbs - Milton, Wellesley, Brookline, Auburndale.

My dad's maternal grandparents, Arthur and Vergetta Sayers King, joined them in Wellesley sometime between 1920, when the census showed them as living in Lakewood, New Jersey, and 1924, when they were ensconced in a flat at 5 Waban Street. According to my father, they actually lived with the Stodolas for awhile, and my father and his grandfather bonded over a shared passion for butterfly-collecting. One of their neighbors, a Mr Denton, sold them cocoons for a nickel apiece.

5 Waban Street, where my great grandparents lived in Wellesley, shown today

674 Washington St, Brookline, MA, a onetime Stodola address, as it looks now

The Massachusetts years were apparently happy times for my father. For a man who claimed to remember little of his childhood, he came up with quite a few touching or amusing anecdotes. His earliest memories were of a St Bernard-Newfoundland mix named Sandy that they adopted in Milton. Later the family moved to the larger and more urban town of Wellesley, where after attending the Hunnewell Elementary school, my father was transferred to a rapid-promotion class in a Wellesley Hills school that enabled him to complete three years' work in two. Sandy's Wellesley career was less distinguished - he was jailed for fighting with the town clerk's dog.

My dad and Sandy, playing in the snow.

The Hunnewell school as it looked when my dad was enrolled; it is in a different location today.

Mr Denton the butterfly collector was also an avid fisherman and took my father fishing in his canoe. Another neighbor, Thomas Reed, was a craftsman who fashioned a washing machine from a butter tub and encouraged my father's interest in learning how things worked - which he pursued by walking several miles to the Waltham Woolworth's to buy electrical gadgets. His well-to-do friends the Wentworths invited him to their summer home near Lake Massapoag in Sharon, where he and the Wentworth children made ice cream in a hand-operated freezer and enjoyed songfests at a nearby Salvation Army camp. The Wentworths' maid once scolded the children for too much rough-housing - only to discover there had been an earthquake!

* * * * *

As I noted in an earlier post, my grandmother was a professional elocutionist who also painted, acted, and wrote poetry and plays; my grandfather was a Juilliard-trained concert pianist, and the pair often gave joint performances. My father described them, especially his mother, as "pursuers of causes" who entertained a succession of artists and intellectuals - in some instances people who for political or personal reasons might not have been so warmly welcomed elsewhere.

Because of this, and because Wellesley College was the center of a yeasty intellectual community, my father and his two younger brothers must have been exposed to a number of minor and perhaps even major literary lights. Two in particular were singled out in our oral history interview:

* * * * *

The first was Katharine Lee Bates. Although she is best known as the author of “America the Beautiful,” some of her admirers may be surprised to learn about the breadth of her activities and interests, as well as about her long and productive academic career.

Bates was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts in 1859. Her father, a Congregationalist pastor, died a few weeks after she was born, and she was raised mainly by her mother, a graduate of the Mt Holyoke Seminary for women. She herself attended Wellesley College and subsequently studied at Oxford University. After teaching for several years at the secondary school level, she joined the Wellesley faculty, starting as an instructor and ultimately reaching the rank of full professor of English Literature. In addition to being a popular teacher and mentor, she was a scholar, a prolific poet and novelist, a journalist, and an activist who supported the rights of women, people of color, workers, immigrants, the poor, and oppressed populations in general. She was an advocate for the League of Nations and opposed the American policy of isolationism. She has been credited with helping to found the field of American literature by creating a new college course and writing one of the first textbooks on the subject. She died in 1929.

She was courted seriously by at least two men and appears to have reciprocated their feelings, but in the end she somehow couldn't find a way to remain in the same place with them long enough to cement the relationships. By contrast, she managed to live for 25 years with her beloved friend and fellow scholar Katharine Coman, until Coman's death from breast cancer in 1915, in an arrangement commonly referred to as a "Boston marriage" (or sometimes a "Wellesley marriage"). The exact nature of these close and intense relationships has been much debated, but further speculation about the two Katharines is beyond the scope of this essay.

Bates began writing "America the Beautiful" in 1893, while on a train trip to Colorado ending at Pike's Peak, and published it as a poem two years later. She reworked the words many times, though the basic bones of the piece remained mostly the same. It has been set to music at least 75 times; the one with which we're most familiar was written by Samuel A. Ward in 1882 for his hymn "Materna." I count myself among the many who believe this joyous paean to the multifaceted beauty of our land would make a far more appropriate national anthem than the warlike text of the "Star-Spangled Banner," penned by a slave-owning lawyer and set to the almost unsingable tune of a rowdy English drinking song.

According to my father, Bates was one of my grandmother's elocution students. Since she retired from Wellesley in 1925 at the age of 66, after decades of lecturing, one might well wonder why she would want or need elocution lessons. In fact, Katharine did study elocution in 1885 (before my grandmother was born!) when she was preparing to teach at Wellesley, but Melinda Ponder, author of a fascinating biography of Bates published in 2017, told me she had never come across any indication in Bates's notes or diaries of her ever having done so again. We do know, however, that Bates "abominated" lecturing and all her life considered herself to be a poor public speaker.

Two possibilities, then: 1) She may have anticipated (correctly) being in great demand as a lecturer to wider and more varied audiences after retirement and wished to hone her public speaking skills further. 2) She was part of my grandparents' social circle and visited their home, but my father (who was only a boy at the time) was mistaken about her having studied elocution with his mother. We will likely never know.

* * * * *

Another visitor to the Stodola home was Mary Antin, an immigrant writer and activist best known for her 1912 autobiography The Promised Land.

Antin was born in 1881 to a Jewish family living in present day Belarus. Her father emigrated to Boston in 1891; his wife and six children joined him three years later. Mary completed her elementary school education and attended the Girls' Latin School, now the Boston Latin Academy.

In 1901, she married Amadeus William Grabaum, a German geologist at Columbia University, and moved to New York, where she attended Barnard and Columbia Teachers' College.

Among her new friends in New York was Josephine Lazarus, sister of the poet Emma Lazarus, author of the sonnet “The New Colossus," once mounted on the Statue of Liberty. (Its most famous lines: “Give me your tired, your poor,/ your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ the wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.”) Josephine Lazarus urged Antin to write her autobiography; after Lazarus' death in 1910, she pushed forward with the project as a tribute to her friend. In The Promised Land, she gave an account of the treatment of Jews in Czarist Russia and described her own education and assimilation in her adopted homeland. No other narrative has improved upon the discernment and authenticity with which she captured the Jewish immigrant experience.

In 1914, she published her last full-length work,They Who Knock at our Gates, protesting the movement to restrict immigration. The book was well-received but failed to achieve the popularity of The Promised Land.

Antin must have been near 40, and at a very sad moment in her life, when she encountered the young King Stodola. During World War I, while she campaigned on behalf of the Allies, her husband threw his support to his native Germany. The resulting rift led to their separation. At the end of the War, her husband was forced to leave Columbia and went to China to rebuild his career - in fact, he is known as the "father of Chinese geology." Although they continued to correspond, Antin and her husband never saw each other again. She never fully recovered from this devastating blow.

After the War, with scant hope of ever being reunited with her husband, she moved from New York to the Boston area, where her family still resided, and this is when she was presumably drawn into my grandparents' orbit.

Antin died of cancer in 1949.

* * * * *

Sadly, Arthur King died in Wellesley in 1925. Around the same time, my grandfather was offered a position as training director for the Kingsport Press in Kingsport, Tennessee. The whole family, including Sandy the dog, piled into their Model T touring car and laborously plowed their way south along potholed roads coated with Kentucky red mud. A year later Vergetta died in Kingsport, either during a visit or perhaps more likely because she accompanied her only daughter when the family moved. Vergie's remains were returned to Wellesley for burial alongside her husband.

My grandmother, Beatrice King Stodola, in Tennessee with her sons King, Sid, and Quentin

Kingsport in the 1920s was something of a boom town, boasting the Eastman Chemical Company and a large paper mill in addition to the Kingsport Press. After gaining a foothold there, my grandfather was able to set up his own multigraph business, where my father helped him with printing, typography, and composition.

But as my father told it, Kingsport also had a darker side: The Ku Klux Klan was active, and the men carried revolvers in their coat pockets. My grandmother attended a small Episcopal church in a YMCA that was regarded with suspicion because it was considered to be just short of Roman Catholicism.

And so the family's Boston idyl came to an end - and along with it, my father's carefree childhood. His immediate future held a move to junior high school and the turbulent days of preadolescence, compounded by a fair dose of culture shock. For him and his younger brothers, there would be no more rubbing elbows with the literati.

The family remained in Kingsport though my father's junior high school years, then returned to New York in time for him to attend Brooklyn Technical High School.

The rest, as they say, is history.

0 Comments

AN INTERVIEW WITH MY DAD

9/4/2018

0 Comments

On the morning of April 6, 1992, as I was on my way out the door to go to jury duty, my stepmother Rose called from her home in Florida to tell me that my father had died peacefully during the night. My first impulse was to start packing, but Rose felt it was a good idea to postpone the memorial service until a time when we could all make arrangements to come, and I conceded she had a point. So there I stood, with my coat on, feeling slightly stunned. I wasn't sure what to do; I wasn't needed in Florida, so I just went and did my jury duty.

Later in the week, I mentioned to my sister Leslie that it felt very odd to be going about my business as usual, when what I really wanted to do was shout, "Hey, World, stop! Something's missing! Someone's gone!" Leslie replied that her response to this dilemma had been to listen again to an oral history interview I'd conducted with our father in 1979. I thought that was a wise suggestion, and over the next few days my husband Ovide and I spent our dinner hour doing the same thing.

I expected hearing my father's voice to be therapeutic because it would give me an opportunity to reflect on him and his life as I felt the need to do in the immediate aftermath of his death. It did that, but it also turned out to be therapeutic in a way I didn't anticipate: It took me back beyond those last terrible two or three years of watching the tragedy of a man with over twenty patents to his name forget how to use his computer and unable to work his answering machine and brought back a larger perspective on his life as a whole.

* * * * *

I caught my father at perhaps the ideal moment for our interview. He had had major surgery a few weeks earlier; he was now nearly recovered but not quite ready to return to work full-time. He was just shy of his 65th birthday and was considering various retirement schemes; at this crossroads in his life, he was very receptive to my proposal that we use that time to capture and preserve on tape his personal and professional history.

I had recently completed a two-year stint as editor of a grant-funded oral history project, so I not only recognized the importance of seizing the opportunity but also had a pretty good idea of how to go about conducting such an interview. I prepared a well-elaborated "interview schedule," starting with close-ended questions that were easy to answer (what was your mother's name? when were you born? etc.) so that he would be relaxed by the time I got to the tougher and more thought-provoking questions. I took along two portable tape recorders and mikes (to ensure a backup if either failed) and plenty of pre-labeled audiocassettes. When I arrived at his home, I identified a couple of comfortable chairs in his living room, where over the course of the three days I had set aside for this project, October 2, 3, and 4, we talked for more than five hours, limiting our sessions to a couple of hours apiece to avoid tiring either him or myself.

Any fears I might have had about persuading him to open up proved unfounded. Although he always professed to remember little about his childhood, over the course of the interview I was able to elicit many anecdotes I had never heard and details about his past of which I was only vaguely aware. I think that like me, he had prepared for the interview and spent some time reflecting on what made him the man he was - formative experiences, the importance of friendships and of mentors in his life, his hard-won education at highly selective institutions, his long affiliation with the Unitarians, the development of his career-building skills, and of course his family commitments. In all, we covered the entire sweep of his life, starting with his parents and their roots and ending with a retrospective on his career as he started looking forward to a new life stage. My post About My Father, as well as many other entries to this blog, draws heavily on this material.

In the half-dozen audiocassettes that resulted from this effort, my family has something more precious than anything else he could have left to us.

It was standard procedure at every interview conducted during my time with the oral history project to take a photograph of the subject. So I can hardly believe I didn't take one of my own father, but if I did, I haven't been able to find it. This photo taken in 1976, of my dad, my stepmother, myself, and my dog Goldie, is as close as I can come to how we must have looked at the time of the interview.

* * * * *

A few months after his death, when we discussed what we could do to commemorate the life of King Stodola at his memorial service, it occurred to me that the tapes might have the same healing effect on those in attendance as they had on me, that of restoring to us in some measure the man as we knew him.

From the several hours of material I'd gathered, I chose a brief segment about his proudest achievement, his participation in Project Diana. I particularly liked this excerpt because I felt it captured the pride he took in this accomplishment, his fundamental humility, his keen intelligence, his dry sense of humor - and perhaps above all, his gentleness. A transcript of this passage appears elsewhere on this site.

0 Comments

ME AND MY UKULELE

6/29/2018

5 Comments

I received a ukulele for Christmas one year and learned to play it well enough to give me pleasure and avoid annoying those around me. Compared to the other instruments I took up as a kid (or more accurately had thrust upon me) - the piano and the saxophone (for which my father paid $25 in an Asbury Park pawn shop) - my ukulele was, well, quiet. And while playing it at a virtuoso level would have taken more practice than I was ever willing to throw at it, and probably more talent than I could muster, it wasn’t that hard to tune it (G-C-E-A, with the memorable lyrics “my dog has fleas”) and to learn enough chords to make my way through a few familiar songs. “On Top of Old Smoky,” all umpty verses - even without googling I can still dredge up at least five - was my hands-down fave.

But what was a little girl in a small coastal New Jersey town doing with an exotic Hawaiian stringed instrument?

Me and my ukulele.

Luckily enough, I have a photograph of myself clutching my ukulele - slightly blurry, but clear enough to permit further research on the topic.

The ukulele is a plucked stringed instrument belonging to the lute/mandolin family. Although it is sometimes thought of as quintessentially Hawaiian, along with hula dancers in grass skirts and leis, it was actually developed in the 1880s by Portuguese immigrants who came to Hawaii from Madiera and Cape Verde, based on similar guitar-like Portuguese instruments. Its place in Hawaiian music and culture was cemented by the support of King Kalakaua, who enthusiastically promoted the instrument and made it a central part of performances at royal gatherings.

The US mainland discovered the ukulele in 1915, at the Hawaiian Pavilion of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Being cheap, portable, and relatively easy to learn to play passably well, the uke quickly passed into the popular culture, appearing in film and becoming a mainstay of jazz, country music, and American song.

The life trajectories of two men converged to turn the ukulele into the musical phenom it was to become in the post World War II era:

The first was Arthur Godfrey, folksy host of a series of eponymous radio and then television variety shows. My Aunt Phyllis, my mother’s younger sister, always claimed to dislike Arthur Godfrey because, she said, he laughed at his own jokes, but whenever his show came on the air, she poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down to listen. We often spent several days with Aunt Phyllis and her family in Worcester MA during our summer vacations, and when “the Old Redhead” (as he called himself) came on we stopped what we were doing and joined her in her kitchen. He was famous for poking good-natured fun at his sponsors’ products. The off-script commercial I remember best was his test of the proposition that Lipton teabags could be reused for several days in a row. The second day came and went without too much comment, but by the third day his reaction was simply “blecch.” He got away with it because it was known he would not accept a sponsor whose products he didn’t personally enjoy, and because (bottom line) it sold those products.

Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts started in 1945 as a radio show. From 1948 to 1958 the show was transferred to the next big thing, TV, but continued to be simulcast on the radio. From 1949 to 1959, he also broadcast Arthur Godfrey and his Friends, also known as simply the Arthur Godfrey Show, which featured many of the Talent Scout winners including Pat Boone, Eddie Fisher, Tony Bennett, Connie Francis, Patsy Cline - and Julius LaRosa. LaRosa, in fact, triggered a downturn in Arthur Godfrey’s popularity in 1953 when Godfrey fired him on-air, without warning, for exhibiting too much independence or, as Godfrey put it, “a lack of humility.” That was not how underlings were supposed to be treated in those days, and it didn’t sit well with his fans. But during his radio days and his early years on TV, everything he touched turned to gold. He raked in millions of dollars for his bosses and as a result was probably the first media star to become truly wealthy.

It is sometimes said that apart from being an uber-genial host, Arthur Godfrey was devoid of any special talent. This isn’t strictly true; he was an accomplished ukulele player who even gave on-air ukulele lessons. “If a kid has a uke in hand,” he assured parents, “he’s not going to get into much trouble.” Too bad color TV had not yet come in; black-and-white could never do full justice to Godfrey’s shock of red hair and his colorful Hawaiian shirts as he strummed his big baritone ukulele. Through him, the ukulele found a welcome in millions of American homes.

The second contributor to the postwar ukulele craze was an Italian luthier named Mario Maccaferri, until then best known for designing the guitar played by the legendary Romani musician Django Reinhardt. Maccaferri was also a classical guitar virtuoso in his own right, perhaps in a league with Segovia, until a freak swimming accident in 1933 injured his right hand and ended his performing career forever. He continued making stringed instruments, however, and also started a business in France making high-quality reeds for woodwind instruments.

In 1939, Maccaferri fled with his family from war-torn Europe to the US, struggling to maintain his reed-making business (now christened the French American Reed Manufacturing Company) in the Bronx, despite a wartime shortage of the French cane he needed to make his product. Then a visit to the NY World Fair introduced him to a new concept - plastics! - and fired his imagination. He started experimenting with polystyrene reeds and found that indeed, they worked pretty well, especially when wooden reeds were unavailable. Endorsements from clarinetist Benny Goodman and other Big Band musicians brought him a good customer base. Emboldened by his success, he went on to found his own molding and manufacturing company, Mastro Industries, which produced cheap plastic versions of everything from clothespins to toilet seats.

Everything went well until it didn’t. Eventually, a combination of increased competition, increased demand for more upscale fixtures, and increased availability of alternative construction materials started making serious inroads, and Mastro Industries found itself on the skids.

That’s where things stood when a chance poolside encounter between Mario Maccaferri and Arthur Godfrey in a Florida hotel rocked both their worlds - and ended up putting ukuleles into the hands of millions of American kids including mine. The two men knocked back a few drinks, played a couple of impromptu duets, and bemoaned the lack of affordable mass-produce-able ukuleles. Maccaferri had long dreamed of making a plastic ukulele but lacked the capital to proceed without some promise of success. When Godfrey replied that he could sell a million of them, Maccaferri was inspired to revive his dream and redouble his efforts to finance this new venture.

Although Maccaferri’s earlier attempts to make a plastic guitar and his subsequent attempts to make a plastic violin were neither commercial nor artistic successes, it turned out that plastic was well suited to producing an instrument-quality ukulele. After extensive research, he settled on Dow Styron, which gave him the warm wood-like tone he was seeking, and strung it with nylon strings made by DuPont. He called his creation the Islander and packaged it with a pick, a tuning tool, instructions, and a songbook. It sold for $5.95.

Just like the box that appeared under our Christmas tree.

Nine million sold!

Toy plastic ukuleles like Mattel’s Uke-a-Doodle had done well, but the Islander was no toy. Arthur Godfrey, who as noted would never embrace a product he wasn’t willing to use himself, tried it and fell in love. He began promoting it on his shows and the orders poured in. In the end, more than nine million ukuleles were manufactured and sold. Godfrey never asked Maccaferri for a penny; he could well afford to indulge his own dream of making the ukulele a household item. A broad grin would undoubtedly have lit up the Old Redhead’s freckled face to see me and a dozen other student ukulele players in an onstage strum-fest during a school assembly - a scene that was probably repeated hundreds of times in school auditoriums across the nation during the heyday of the ukulele.

* * * * *

Look closely at my photo and you’ll see an odd gadget on the neck of my ukulele. At first I thought it might be a capo - basically a clamp used to shorten the strings evenly, enabling you to play in different keys using the same fingering - so you only have to learn one set of chords. (Call it a "cheater" at your peril!) But no, it was something that potentially simplified the process even further - the Chord Master, an automatic chording device invented and patented by Maccaferri that allowed you to play six basic chords with the push of a button. For an extra dollar you could get a Chord Master for your Islander, as obviously my parents did.

It all comes back! The Chord Master was supposed to be attached with two rubber bands, and I sort of recall having trouble making the darn thing stay put - probably more a commentary on my technique than on the device itself. Again stirring up some long-dormant memories, I think there was an additional reason for my Chord Master woes: The buttons are labeled D7, B7, and G on the upper row and D, A7, and E7 on the lower row - indicating that the Islander was supposed to be tuned not to G-C-E-A, as I did, but rather a whole tone higher, to A-D-F#-B. That had to be confusing to anyone who was looking for the chords you’d expect to use in the key of C.

For whatever reason, in the end I ditched the Chord Master. Instead, I mastered a handful of chords and then limited my repertoire to songs that required only those chords.

* * * * *

Tiny Tim

Predictably, imitators started cutting into Mastro’s market, and in response additional models, both larger ukes and the smaller “ukette,” proliferated in the wake of the Islander’s success. And then, with the advent of rock music, the popularity of the ukulele took a nosedive. As Arthur Godfrey had said, “If a kid has a uke in hand, he’s not going to get into much trouble.” Where’s the fun in that? Kids eager to cultivate a "bad boy" image followed their musical heroes and took up the guitar, not the ukulele. If you were inclined to write the ukulele’s obituary, you could do worse than to choose February 9, 1964 as the day it officially died, with the Beatles’ American debut on the Ed Sullivan Show (though in fact the Beatles loved the ukulele and occasionally played it onstage). Herbert “Tiny Tim” Khaury probably put the final nail in its coffin in 1968 with his popular but wildly campy falsetto rendition of “Tiptoe through the Tulips,” stripping the poor old uke of whatever shred of dignity it might once have had and masking its genuine musical versatility.

But the ukulele just won’t stay dead. It has enjoyed at least two revivals since then. The first was in the 1990s, when a new generation of instrument makers started appealing to a new generation of musicians, most of whom had forgotten Tiny Tim and maybe even the Beatles. The second is now in progress, fueled by the rise of youtube ukulele artists like Hawaii native Jake Shimabukuro, whose videos routinely go viral.

Don’t look at me, however. I haven’t played a uke since the 1950s, and my once-cherished Islander has long since disappeared into the mists of time.

5 Comments

ARMSTRONG AND THE TRIUMPH OF FM RADAR

6/8/2018

0 Comments

In 1991, just a few months before he died, my father was awarded the Armstrong medal and plaque by the Radio Club of America. Of all the accolades he received, none would have been more meaningful to him. Sadly, he was suffering from Alzheimer's Disease and beyond grasping the nature of the honor that had been bestowed on him. He hadn’t forgotten, however, that Major Edwin Howard Armstrong was one of his heroes, and he would happily discourse about the importance of Armstrong’s work to anyone who would listen.

I now wish I had listened more closely.

* * * * *

Most radio buffs are familiar with Armstrong’s turbulent career in wireless communications, during which he revolutionized the field not once but repeatedly - in the process stirring up mighty opposition from stakeholders in a new way of doing business that had little use for lone-wolf inventors like Armstrong.

His earliest work focused on improving receiver sensitivity. While still in college, he perfected the regenerative circuit, which dramatically improved radio reception by means of a positive feedback loop in the receiver, using a triode tube recently invented by Lee De Forest. Armstrong went on to invent the superheterodyne, which still further improved reception by mixing an incoming high-frequency signal with a second tunable lower-frequency signal to produce a predetermined intermediate frequency (IF) still further improved reception. The superheterodyne outperformed every previous approach including his own regenerative receiver and remains the industry standard to this day.

He then turned his attention to developing wide-band frequency modulation (FM) radio. Radios in use at the time were designed to be sensitive to the strength or amplitude of the incoming signal (that is, amplitude modulation or AM), but were also sensitive to environmental disturbances such as thunderstorms or electromagnetic waves emanating from electronic equipment. No amount of tweaking or shielding could fix this problem. Armstrong took a radically different approach, arguing that by varying the frequency instead of the amplitude of the signal to be transmitted and designing receivers accordingly, such interference could be prevented. He devoted much of the remainder of his life to demonstrating the superiority of FM.

As a wedding gift to his wife, Armstrong (shown here on their honeymoon in Palm Beach) built the world's first boombox.

Armstrong, a fearless climber, atop RCA's 115-foot north tower on the roof of the 21-story Aeolian Hall in midtown Manhattan.

Unfortunately for Armstrong, the commercial potential of the burgeoning field of wireless communication created a mercilessly competitive environment dominated by huge, well-heeled corporations. Armstrong’s genius as a radio engineer was matched only by his naivete about the realities of organizational politics (“all substance and no style,” as one biographer put it). Wildly underestimating the ability of greed and self-interest to prevail against (as he saw it) simple truth and honesty, Armstrong engaged in a long series of time-consuming, expensive, and sometimes quixotic legal battles to defend and protect his own interests.

His first such encounter was with Lee De Forest, who responded to Armstrong’s success by laying claim to the idea of regeneration, despite little evidence that he even understood how the triode tube he invented worked, let alone that he had dreamed up Armstrong’s brilliant new application for it. The ensuing litigation lasted for over a decade, with AT&T throwing its muscle behind De Forest after buying up his patents. In the end the Supreme Court, befuddled by the technical details, ruled against Armstrong, despite universal recognition among his scientific peers that regeneration was his invention and not De Forest’s.

His conflict with De Forest, personally and professionally devastating though it was, paled in comparison to that subsequently elicited by the introduction of FM technology. By essentially eliminating the static that bedeviled AM radio, FM threatened the broadcasting industry not only by obsolescing millions of dollars worth of existing radio equipment overnight but also by diverting interest, attention, and coveted frequencies away from the anticipated Next Big Thing, television.

The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) - led by David Sarnoff, formerly his friend and collaborator, now his bitter foe - was not about to take this lying down. Both fair means and foul were employed to thwart Armstrong: Lawsuits were filed and then intentionally dragged out, patents were infringed, royalties were withheld, reverse engineering was used to buttress fake claims of priority. Armstrong was forced to remove his equipment from the top of the Empire State Building, ostensibly to make room for television equipment, driving him to move his operation to Alpine NJ. Here the first FM station, W2XMN, began broadcasting in 1939 - but only after the FCC first revoked his license and then restored it but diverted FM into a new frequency band at limited power - again, supposedly to make way for TV channel 1. (Ironically the Alpine station was briefly resuscitated after radio communication from the World Trade Center came to an abrupt halt on Nine-Eleven.)

FM station W2XMN broadcast from Alpine, NJ, where Armstrong's 425 ft antenna tower dominated the Palisades landscape. It's still there!

Faced with the prospect of seemingly unending legal battles he could ill afford, Armstrong became despondent and even lashed out at his beloved wife Marion, who moved out of their home to escape further abuse. On the night of January 31, 1954, Edwin Armstrong donned his overcoat, scarf, gloves, and hat, removed the air conditioner from a window of his 13th floor apartment in Manhattan’s exclusive River House, and jumped to his death. Marion Armstrong continued to prosecute her husband’s unresolved infringement suits and ultimately triumphed, winning some $10 million in damages. Sadly, this vindication came too late to comfort or benefit Armstrong himself.

* * * * *

Far less known - perhaps because it remained highly classified for many years - is the story of Armstrong’s work on FM radar during World War II. Indeed, in Armstrong’s entry in the Dictionary of American Biography, this phase of his career is casually dismissed as “a hiatus caused by World War II.”

Politically conservative and proud of his military service in World War I, Armstrong generously extended to the US government royalty-free use of the patents he had so fiercely defended - a patriotic but costly gift. Meanwhile, in addition to his legal expenses, he was self-funding much of his research at Columbia (having declined a salary for his appointment as a full professor at Columbia in order to escape administrative duties and minimize teaching responsibilities), as well as his high-powered FM station in Alpine NJ. (His red and white antenna, all 425 feet of it, still looms over the surrounding Palisades landscape, where its affluent neighbors regard it as an eyesore.)

As his debts mounted catastrophically, his attorney, Alfred McCormack, urged him to accept government contracts for his investigations of long range radar. These contracts enabled Armstrong to hire an assistant, Robert Hull, a newly-minted Columbia graduate, and together the two set about adapting FM technology to radar.

As usual, Armstrong’s approach flew in the face of popular wisdom, which favored pulse radar - that is, bursts of extremely short waves that produced a quick response and allowed for a clear distinction among objects in their path. Armstrong instead pursued continuous-wave radar, specifically continuous-wave FM radar. Its disadvantages - mainly its relative slowness - turned out (in Armstrong’s hands) to be more than offset by the enormous increase in range it afforded, far beyond the several hundred miles achievable with pulse radar. Although World War II ended before this technology could be applied, it subsequently became the method of choice in an age when aircraft traveling at supersonic speeds required the longest possible range. Once again, Armstrong had revolutionized a field.

* * * * *

And here begins my quest to clarify the nature of Armstrong’s role in Project Diana. Starting with a standard SCR-271 early warning radar, Armstrong and Hull had transformed the equipment into a powerful transmitter and sensitive receiver. The Project Diana team modified the set still further, adding a tunable crystal to enhance sensitivity to the weak return signal. Their successful moon shot on January 10, 1946 constituted a conclusive test of Armstrong’s FM continuous-wave Doppler radar system, which provided the critical impetus needed to enable very high frequency (VHF) electromagnetic waves to penetrate the ionosphere, bounce off the moon, and be received back on earth.

As I worked on my most recent blog entry, about the famous bedspring antenna, I found myself becoming increasingly curious about whether Armstrong had directly interacted with the Project Diana team, and whether he had actually spent time with them at Camp Evans during this period. On the one hand, I had never, among all the first-person accounts I’d read by the Project Diana team, including my own oral history interview with my father, encountered any mention of face-to-face meetings or discussions with Armstrong. On the other hand, Belmar and Alpine are less than 100 miles apart, and Armstrong was highly familiar with the Marconi facility, where he and David Sarnoff in happier times had first listened to signals from his regenerative receiver.

The answers to these questions proved surprisingly elusive, even after I consulted such authoritative and comprehensive sources as Empire of the Air by Tom Lewis, Man of High Fidelity by Lawrence Lessing, The Invention that Changed the World, by Robert Buderi, and the librarians in charge of the Armstrong archives at Columbia University. Finally, with the help of Fred Carl, Director of the InfoAge Science History Learning Center, I found my way to Al Klase, who works with the New Jersey Antique Radio Club's Radio Technology Museum at InfoAge, where he maintains their Edwin Armstrong Page.

Al very kindly directed me to an audio recording made in 2005 of an interview with Renville McMann, a panelist at a celebration broadcast from Alpine of the 70th anniversary of FM radio [starting at min 7:00]. In this loving reminiscence of Armstrong, McMann describes the time he innocently suggested that Armstrong point his equipment towards the moon - and with uncharacteristic vehemence, Armstrong refused. That feat, as McMann later learned, was reserved for the Army. “Armstrong had a duplicate setup of the Camp Evans equipment at Alpine,” adds Al; indeed, “the SCR-271 radar tower, sans antenna, is still there…. So clearly, there was direct contact with the Diana team. Armstrong's narrow-band receiver was crucial to the success of the project.”

Al goes on to observe, “It's easy to assume Armstrong visited Camp Evans during the Diana era, it was only a day trip, even without modern roads, but I see no hard evidence. Dave Ossman, in his excellent radio drama version of Empire of the Air [starting at min 7:26] has Armstrong at Evans for the first experiment, but rereading [the original book version of Empire of the Air by Tom Lewis, p. 298], we could attribute this to artistic license. I, too, would like to know if he was there.”

Dear Readers, if you have any further information on this or any other question relating to Armstrong’s association with the Project Diana team, please help me flesh out the unfinished story of Edwin Howard Armstrong and Project Diana.

0 Comments

THE FAMOUS BEDSPRING ANTENNA

4/22/2018

0 Comments

My parents, never known to be particularly demonstrative, were uncharacteristically ebullient. After months of intense activity and preparation, my father and his colleagues had “shot the moon” with radar waves, and the moon had echoed back: message received. “We did it!” he exclaimed, enfolding his wife in a bear hug. “I knew you would!” my mother replied with a broad grin. She knew from long experience that if my father said something could be done, it almost certainly could.

Not everyone, however, had shared my mother’s implicit faith that Project Diana would succeed. Radar had more than demonstrated its utility during World War II in locating enemy aircraft and submarines, but - hit the moon? Earlier unsuccessful efforts had convinced many that asking radio waves to pierce the ionosphere, hit a designated object in space, and then return back through earth’s atmosphere to the point of origin was expecting too much of the technology. Indeed, the standard method for measuring the distance to the ionosphere at that time was “pulse ranging” - that is, bouncing radio waves off the reflective surface of the ionosphere and timing their return, not passing through it.

Only a group of optimistic visionaries would attempt such a feat. Only a group of engineers would have the practical know-how to accomplish it.

This effort was the brainchild of Lt Col John "Jack" DeWitt, head of the Evans Signal Laboratory at Camp Evans in Wall, NJ. Right after the Japanese surrender in September of 1945, DeWitt was assigned the task of developing radars capable of detecting missiles from the Soviet Union. Since no missiles were available for a test,
DeWitt decided the moon could serve as a stand-in - and incidentally allow him to carry out a project he had dreamed of since long before World War II. Like my mother and unlike the skeptics, he was quite confident (despite a previous failure of his own several years earlier) that it could be done, if done right.

If ever there was a monument to American ingenuity, it is surely Project Diana. The approach, as I mentioned in an earlier post, was to work rapidly and intensively, use and modify materials already on hand, and then test, test, test. “Materials already on hand” was the watchword. No attempt was made to design any of the main components for the project from scratch, and little if anything new was purchased to make it happen. The transmitter, the receiver, and the antenna all represented novel applications and redesigns of equipment they had used before.

These three elements were interdependent and had to work together as one for the project to succeed. Arguably the most critical, however, was the antenna, since the failure of previous attempts was attributable in large measure to insufficient sensitivity of the receiver antenna.

* * * * *

By the end of World War I, Army scientists at Fort Monmouth realized that the biggest threat in the next war would come from the air, and that Americans could no longer depend on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to protect and isolate them. Early detection of incoming threats was crucial if attacks on the homeland were to be avoided or minimized. Initial conceptual explorations of radar began as early as 1920. In the mid 1930s, radar research at Fort Monmouth took a more practical turn, to the point where development of a prototype of the SCR [Signal Corps Radio OR Set Complete Radio, used interchangeably]-268 was well underway.

Then, in 1938, shaken by the discovery in their midst of a Nazi spy named Guenther Gustave Maria Rumrich, a Chicago-born German whose friendly curiosity had enabled him to infiltrate the radar research program alarmingly easily, the Army decided to increase security and reduce accessibility by moving the operation from Fort Monmouth to Fort Hancock.

It was at Fort Hancock that the legendary SCR-270/271, capable of detecting bombers 150 miles away, was developed under the leadership of Dr. Harold Zahl. Among other important innovations, this system featured a common antenna for both transmitting and receiving, made possible by a gas-discharge device called a duplexer invented by Zahl. The SCR-270 was a mobile unit; the SCR-271 was a fixed, tower-mounted version that differed mainly in having an antenna with a somewhat higher resolution.

My father was recruited as a young engineer to the Army's radar research program at Fort Hancock in early 1941, in the Radio Position Finding section. He participated in the development of the SCR-270/271 radar and continued to work on modifying and improving it throughout the War. Many years later, he wrote of this radar that it was "still the Old Faithful, coming through where more modern and more advertised sets have become unavailable."

An SCR-270, with its bedspring-type reflective array antenna, ready to rock and roll.

As the nation inexorably drifted towards war, it was realized that Fort Hancock, at the tip of a peninsula surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, New York Bay, and Sandy Hook Bay, also had some shortcomings as a location for radar research. More space was needed, it was argued, and the fierce nor'easters that periodically struck the base coated the radar equipment with a film of salt that undermined performance. Its location, so favorable to defense from conventional land and sea attacks, made it vulnerable to U-boat strikes.

So the Army purchased the old Marconi site in Belmar from King’s College and rechristened it Camp Evans. Piecemeal, the radar research program was evacuated from Fort Hancock. Pearl Harbor hastened the transfer, and by 1942 the move to Camp Evans was complete.

With the acquisition of the Camp Evans site, the Signal Corps inherited a rich history of antenna development. During World War I, the Navy had assumed control of the property, and although Marconi’s famous 400-foot wireless towers were used for the dispatch of important messages - indeed, historians dubbed World War I the “wireless war” - breakthroughs in reducing radio static achieved by a resident Canadian scientist named Roy Weagant enabled replacement of these ungainly structures by safer and cheaper if more ho-hum 30-foot antennas. This news was kept under wraps until after the War; “The End of the Giant Towers,” proclaimed contemporary headlines. All of them were gone by 1925.

The arrival of the Army and the entry of the US into World War II transformed the site into a major center for radar research. In addition to newer systems (some involving testing of conceptual designs developed at the MIT Rad Lab), refinement and stepped-up production of the "Old Faithful" SCR-270/271 continued throughout the War - turning Building 37 into a veritable antenna factory as bedspring-type array antennas ranging in length from 2 to 30 feet were assembled for installation on trailers to be used in remote locations. One such SCR-270 radar provided an early warning of incoming Japanese aircraft at Pearl Harbor - though in one of history’s most egregious command and control failures, the information was initially misinterpreted by the Operator and subsequently discounted by the Commanding Officer on duty.

* * * * *

Project Diana, a name intended (among other things) to befuddle the Guenther Rumrichs of the world, introduced a whole new series of challenges beyond the reach of existing technology designed for (relatively) short-distance detection of enemy aircraft.

Early on, DeWitt decided to use as a starting point a crystal-controlled FM transmitter/receiver specially designed for the Signal Corps by Major Edwin H. Armstrong, the "father of FM radio," by modifying an SCR-271. This set had features that could address two important problems:

1) Due to the relative velocities of the earth and moon, the frequency of the returning echo differed from the transmitted signal (a phenomenon known as Doppler shift) by as much as 300Hz, a number that was constantly changing depending earth's rotation and moon's orbital path. DeWitt called on the Theoretical Studies Group for these elegant calculations, which were done by the mathematician Walter McAfee.) The Armstrong radio was capable of being fine-tuned to the exact frequency required to compensate for the Doppler shift at a given point in time.

2) Signals bounced off an object 238,000 miles from earth would take much longer to echo and be much too weak to be detected by receiving antennas then in use. As noted, this was a problem that had bedeviled previous attempts to shoot the moon. To amplify the incoming signal, it was decided to generate a much longer pulse that would be easier for the receiving antenna to detect. The Armstrong radio was one of the few existing sets capable of generating such a long pulse.

The long pulse, while solving one problem, created another, since there was no antenna on site ready to receive such a signal. To come up with a solution, DeWitt called on the Antenna Design Section at Camp Evans. Two prominent antenna specialists, one the section head, designed a novel system using a quarter-wave step-up transformers. This approach failed to work, however, even after extensive efforts to tweak the transmitter.

DeWitt then turned to his own little group of engineers, who came up with the inspired solution of positioning two SCR-271 stationary radars side-by-side to create an enormous (40x40 ft) double bedspring antenna consisting of a 8x8 array of half-wave dipoles in front of a reflector that further enhanced the 111.5 MHz signals. Who was the first to propose that approach will probably never be known, but given my father's long experience and intimate familiarity with the SCR-271, his leadership role on the team, and his general approach to problem-solving, it wouldn't surprise me if the credit belonged to him. In any event, translating the idea into reality was undoubtedly easier said than done, but engineers from the Mechanical Design Center rose to the occasion and succeeded in assembling the Diana Bedspring. (Unfortunately, engineering specifications were destroyed by the Army in 1971, so our knowledge of the design details remains sketchy.)

This whole contraption - there is no other word for it - was mounted atop a 100-ft reinforced tower in the northeast corner of Camp Evans. The heavy and ungainly antenna could not be tilted, it could only be rotated in azimuth; so moonshots could only be attempted twice a day, usually at moonrise but occasionally at moonset, during the 40-minute window open when the moon passed through the 15 degree wide beam of the antenna pattern.

Panoramic view of Camp Evans

The iconic Diana Bedspring, perhaps the most famous antenna in history, has become the unofficial symbol of Project Diana. Its picture, doctored by a photo editor who thought the moon looked too dim in the original so used 20th century “Photoshop” technology to “burn in” a picture of the sun in its place, appeared on the front pages of newspapers and on magazine covers throughout the world. Readers of this blog see it every time they open a new post. If the late David Mofensen’s dream of having Project Diana commemorated on a postage stamp is ever fulfilled (which can’t happen before 2046 because - I know, I checked - the US Postal Service will only issue such stamps in multiples of fifty years after the event), surely the Diana Bedspring will be the featured image.

* * * * *

So where is the Diana Bedspring? Perhaps it was scrapped in the mid-1950s, when the Army removed its old radar units from the site to make way for a parabolic dish antenna, a design already in widespread use by most US search radar at the end of the War. Or perhaps it was finally destroyed in the early 1990s, when the Army began to demolish the historic site in response to a Department of Defense decision to close many military bases including Camp Evans - until Fred Carl, now Director of the InfoAge Science History Center, almost literally threw his body in the path of the wrecking ball. Or perhaps it is still being stored in pieces in some forgotten location, awaiting reassembly. In any event, it is, in the wistful words of an InfoAge volunteer, “no longer available.”

The replacement antenna was a 50-foot dish created by the Signal Corps, using the frame of a captured Nazi Wurzburg Reise radar, to serve as our first satellite tracking antenna. In honor of its predecessor, it was dubbed the “Diana Dish.” In 1957, when the Soviets stole a march on the US by launching their Sputnik satellite, the Diana Dish was joined by a companion 60-foot dish named the “Space Sentry.” In 1960, control of space research was transferred to a new civilian agency, NASA, which continued the weather observation research already underway at the Diana site and proudly broadcast the first televised images of cloud movements from space.

The Diana Dish has joined the Diana Bedspring in the dustbin of history, but the Space Sentry was gifted by the Army to InfoAge, which has refurbished it for scientific and educational purposes as part of a larger effort to restore and preserve the Diana site. On January 10, 2015, a local amateur radio club celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Project Diana experiment by using the Space Sentry to make a series of Earth-Moon-Earth contacts.

The Space Sentry, just a few hundred feet from where the Diana Bedspring once stood.

* * * * *

Although the development of communications satellites has obsolesced moon bounce as a national security tool, Earth-Moon-Earth or EME has become quite popular among amateur radio operators. The object of modern EME, unlike Project Diana but like successor projects such as PAMOR, is a two-way exchange of information, in which a signal is sent from one station to another by ricocheting it off the moon; overcoming the challenges of weak signal communication is part of the fun and represents a test of skill. EME is the longest path between any two stations on earth.

To accomplish this feat, EME enthusiasts need to erect antennas that by amateur radio standards are often large enough to jangle the nerves of Property Owners’ Associations and perhaps violate the aesthetic sensibilities of their XYLs (ham-speak for ”ex young ladies” - that is, ahem, their wives). By Project Diana standards, however, most modern EME antennas are mere minikins and some are even portable.

0 Comments

DR HELEN JONES

2/3/2018

2 Comments

In the mid 1970s, I worked for two years as the Director of a grant-funded Oral History Project on Women in Medicine at the Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (formerly the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania and the last medical school in the country to go co-ed; currently part of the Drexel University College of Medicine). In that capacity, and as co-editor of a book that included several oral history interviews resulting from that project, I learned quite a bit about the history of women in medicine in the United States and the obstacles these pioneers encountered in their attempts to achieve their career goals. I am, you might say, something of an expert.

So I felt more than a little sheepish when it only recently crossed my mind that my childhood pediatrician, Dr Helen E Jones, was a part of that history; and that even being her patient, at a time when only a tiny fraction of physicians were women, was an unlikely feature of my childhood. I immediately recognized this topic as a potential blog entry. Almost as immediately, I recognized that despite my vivid visceral memories of Dr. Jones - her strawberry blonde curls, her small physique, her all-business demeanor, and of course all those injections! - I knew next to nothing about the biographical details of her life or the hardships she must have endured to obtain her credentials and establish a thriving medical practice in a small coastal New Jersey town.

Having gotten as far as I could with google and the archives of the Asbury Park Press, I consulted two main additional sources. One was my friend Sandra Chaff, Archivist-Director of the MCP Archives and Special Collections on Women and Medicine at the time I worked on the oral history project, who was fierce about finding and preserving documents, photographs, and artifacts relating to the history of women physicians. The other was a Facebook Shark River Hills nostalgia site several of whose members were also patients of Dr Jones and were generous in sharing their recollections.

I am now happy to report that with a little help from my friends (thanks, guys!), I have cobbled together at least a blogs-worth of information about the elusive Dr Jones. And I am especially happy to post it on February 3, National Women Physicians Day, celebrated on the birthday of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from medical school in the US and a trailblazer in promoting medical education for women throughout her life.

* * * * *

Helen Elizabeth Jones was born on October 15, 1918 in Scranton, PA, the middle of three children of Horace I Jones and Norma A Johns Jones. When Helen was three, the family moved to Asbury Park, where her father taught at Asbury Park High School for many years. Her mother was a musician and teacher who ran her own private school.

After her graduation from Asbury Park High School, wishing to see more of the country, she enrolled in premedical studies at the University of Michigan. She also joined the Psychology and German clubs during her days in Ann Arbor and pursued music and dramatics as well. During her summers at the Jersey Shore she worked as an assistant at a first aid station at the beach.

In September of 1940 she enrolled in Temple University School of Medicine - one of around 10 women in a class of 104. “Gone are the carefree college days,” intoned Dr John B Roxby in his welcoming speech. “You have chosen a great but difficult path, and the travail which lies ahead is of a quantity which may defy your present imagination.” Along with the demands described by Dr Roxby, additional clouds hung on the horizon. The prospect of American entry into World War II loomed larger every day and became a reality at the end of 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill of 1943 was as unsuccessful as succeeding socialized medicine proposals but nonetheless caused uneasiness and fear of the unknown.

Skull (Temple Medical School yearbook), Dec, 1943, Helen E Jones.

Helen’s graduation photo appears in the December 1943 yearbook - possibly on an accelerated schedule to accommodate a wartime need for medical personnel. The accompanying text notes that she was known as “Jonesy” to her close friends and that her special interests were in pediatrics and obstetrics,

During the latter half of her senior year she interned at the Chestnut Hill Hospital in Philadelphia. Following graduation she interned at the Jersey City Medical Center.

At the end of 1944, she started posting notices in the Asbury Park Press that her offices at 617 7th Avenue, located in her home in Asbury Park, would open for business on January 2, 1945, with office hours 2-4 and 7-9pm, and on Sundays by appointment.

Asbury Park Press, 0ct 11 1954. This photo shows Dr Jones (center, holding baby) exactly as I remember her.

In addition to her regular pediatric practice, over the years she took on additional duties, serving on the staff of the Jersey Shore Medical Center in Neptune for nearly 30 years, as school physician in Ocean Township starting in 1957, and as pediatrician to the Asbury Park Well Baby Clinic for 20 years. She was a member of the American and New Jersey Medical Societies and the New Jersey Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Asbury Park Press, Apr 30, 1974, shortly before her retirement.

In 1974, Helen’s brother-in-law accepted a position in California and Helen decided to head west with him and her sister. "I'm worn out physically," she told the Asbury Park Press of her nearly 30 years as a pediatrician, adding that her own physician had advised her to give up her private practice. “It was impossible to retire here," she continued. "I did try to cut down, but it didn't work. Children don't get sick according to a schedule. Pediatrics is a day and night, seven days a week profession. Out in California I will be working eight hours a day, five days a week."

Dr Jagdish Bharara took over her practice in New Jersey, and Helen sold her house in Deal Park.

On May 19, 1974, Helen began her new 40-hours-a-week “day job,” which involved working with what were then described as “retarded and emotionally disturbed children” at Camarillo State Hospital. At the time she arrived, Dr Ivor Lovaas, a pioneer in the application of behavior analytic techniques to autistic children, was at the peak of his career at Camarillo State, so whether or not she worked with him directly, it is impossible that she wasn’t touched by his somewhat controversial use of both rewards and punishments to encourage language skills and reduce self-injurious behavior. It would be interesting to know what she thought of his research-oriented approach, in contrast to the treatment model that had guided her own career.

Helen Elizabeth Jones died on December 17, 1993 in El Dorado, Placerville, California, at the age of 75. Four years later Camarillo State Hospital permanently shuttered its doors.

* * * * *

One of my fellow denizens of Shark River Hills volunteered: “I remember…the shots in the butt!” Another posted this recollection: “I always went into a panic as soon as I smelled the rubbing alcohol. I broke away from her assistant once and ran around the exam room with the syringe hanging off my butt.” Except for the added fillip about the syringe, this funny-but-sad scenario exactly mirrors my own recollection of my mom and Dr Jones's assistant chasing my little sister around the room as she too made a desperate attempt to escape the dreaded needle.

Although I was too wimpy to engage in such hijinks, I had my own personal nickname for Dr. Jones that still comes more naturally to my tongue than her given name: “Fanny Jones” (yes, for the obvious reason). If you think you detect an undertone of affection in that sobriquet, you would be quite wrong. And yet she never did me any harm; indeed, she probably saved my life on more than one occasion. The only thing I can say in extenuation of my youthful animus is that I remember her as rather severe, so the pain she inflicted was not much tempered by warmth or playfulness.

No one likes having a shot, but I cannot remember this level of needle-phobia in the days when I took my own daughters to the doctor. Did we have to endure more shots in those days? I may be exaggerating but I can’t remember a visit to Dr Jones that didn’t include at least one shot. Although the number of vaccine-preventable diseases is larger today than when I was a child, combinations such as diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus didn’t come into use until 1948; the shots and their boosters were given separately. Smallpox inoculations continued to be administered (remnants of my scar are still visible) until the late 1960s and beyond, even after the disease had been eradicated worldwide. The long-awaited vaccine that finally ended the terrors of polio became available in 1955, but the orally-administered version didn’t make its appearance until 1961. So - for awhile, yet another shot.

Non-routine shots were also commonplace - for example, tetanus boosters after injuries, such as I received after a dog bite when I was ten. (Telltale marks where Dr Jones cauterized the wounds can still be seen on my chin and neck - more battle scars!)

Although the antibacterial properties of the Penicillium fungus had been recognized for decades by the time the Scottish biologist Sir Alexander Fleming succeeded in culturing and concentrating it in 1928, it wasn’t until World War II that a form stable enough to be mass produced for clinical use was developed. Overuse of this miracle drug probably began almost immediately. I became seriously ill with bronchitis and pneumonia when I was in the first grade and Dr Jones arrived at our home every morning for two whole weeks (yes, Dr Jones made house calls!), clutching her black doctor’s satchel, to give me an injection. More than my fair share - so little wonder, perhaps, that I felt traumatized by my encounters with her!

Alternatively, is it possible that shots actually hurt more back then? Just about around the time I began my career as a pediatric patient, glass syringes with interchangeable parts, already a staple of medical practice, began to be mass-produced. Not until the mid-1950s were disposable plastic syringes introduced, eliminating the problem of contamination from improper sterilization; might they also have had a smoother action that reduced the ouch-factor? Or do newer manufacturing techniques produce finer and sharper needles than were available in the 1940s? Does modern medical training focus more on minimizing or distracting from the pain of injections? Just spinning out ideas here, but descriptions by diabetics of changes in insulin injections over time lend credence to the possibility that shots are less painful now than they used to be.

* * * * *

What led my mother to choose Dr Jones? I doubt she actively sought out a woman physician, but obviously it didn’t put her off, either. My guess is that when my sister was born in late January of 1945, Dr Jones - having hung out her shingle just three weeks earlier - attended her in the hospital. Perhaps my mother was dissatisfied with her current pediatrician, or perhaps she was attracted by the prospect of joining a new and relatively uncrowded practice. Perhaps she just plain liked Dr Jones, who, despite her failure to win me over, clearly had a way with mothers. Said one grateful mom when Dr Jones retired, "She takes the time necessary to examine the child and encourage and reassure the parents…. Quite simply, she is a good doctor in the highest sense of the word."

* * * * *

Helen Jones and the choices she made were typical of women physicians of her day. Although women overall were not welcome in the medical profession, pediatrics was considered a “soft” specially and therefore better suited to women than specialties engaging in heroic treatments of “really sick” patients, or involving surgery. Moreover, women who married were taken less seriously; unlike men, they were supposed to be “married” to their profession.

By the time Helen graduated from medical school, to be sure, these patterns were starting to crack a little. As a result of World War II, women were working outside the home in larger numbers, a trend that undoubtedly helped Helen build her practice. Helen was also fortunate in having as a role model a mother who ran her own business at a high professional level. Nonetheless, Helen played it safe, opting for a “soft” specialty and remaining single. Failure was probably not an option,

This is not in any way to imply that her choice of pediatrics was simply a matter of expediency. "Medicine is demanding,” she said, “but the thing that makes it all worthwhile is seeing a child grow up well and happy…. You become close to the children and they're almost like your own." She maintained a deep conviction of the larger importance of her work: "They will be the heads of state, one way or the other. You look at a little baby and realize that everybody who comes in contact with that child is going to have an influence on the development of his personality and character.”

Devoted as she was to her profession, Helen was not completely devoid of outside interests and activities. One of my Facebook “informants,” whose cousin worked for many years as Dr Jones’s receptionist, said that Dr Jones shared her home in Deal Park with her sister and brother-in-law, which afforded some presumably welcome companionship. Her mother’s daughter, she was an accomplished musician who played piano and organ. Other hobbies included collecting stamps, with an emphasis on those featuring opera and the history musical instruments; and caring for her two Yorkshire Terrier stud dogs, one of which took a first at the Westminster Dog Show in Madison Square Garden.

Did Helen’s busy pediatric practice - stampeding kids and all - add up to a full and rewarding professional life? Did her hobbies enrich her nonworking hours? Did she miss having children of her own or did she enjoy a little calm and quiet when she returned home in the evening? Did she indulge herself in a few precious moments at the piano communing with Chopin, or did she just drop into bed exhausted? Did her second career working with special-needs children and scaling back to a 40-hour work week in an easier climate give her a new lease on life?

I wonder.

I offer this blog entry not as a love letter, exactly, but as an expression of gratitude for the medical care I was fortunate to receive as a child and as an apology for the ill will I harbored against Dr Jones for no other reason than that she always seemed to be brandishing a needle.

2 Comments

OUR PETS

1/20/2018

2 Comments

We always had pets - at least one dog and one cat, and often more. A few of them show up in the famous Stodola Christmas cards.

Goldie and Penny - a holiday handful

I am ashamed to confess to having possibly contributed to the Stodola cat census via an acquisition method that could best be described as “Look what followed me home.” Never mind that I was covered with scratches from the process of persuading a reluctant feline to “follow” me home. I suppose I may have ended up keeping one or two of these kidnapped unfortunates; most, however, were truly feral animals that were mercifully (for all concerned) released back into the woods.

* * * * *

Before I was born, my parents adopted a kitten and pup duo my mom called Nip and Tuck. I don’t really remember them, but I do know that was the last time my mother ever had a chance to name our pets. After that my father took over, and he reigned supreme till we kids were old enough to join in the name game.

None of those cute pair names like Nip and Tuck or Salt and Pepper or Whisky and Soda for him! Rather, finding something catchy to call our pets was only a starting point for the prolonged discussion by which, through some cabalistic process, we eventually arrived at their true titles. So it turned out that Perky the tabby was really Percopolis, Penny the little car-chasing spaniel was Lady Penelope Penny van Pennysworth, Laurie the goofy boxer was Laurelita von Sniffnwoof, and Goldie, our gentle giant of a yellow tom, was actually John Timothy McGoldrick.

My dad came by this practice honestly. I can’t remember a time when his own mother didn’t have a calico cat capable of prolific reproduction, and although we always knew each in this long succession of creatures as "Orrie," their collective official name was Aurora Borealis. My grandmother charged $5 for each of Orrie's kittens, claiming they were much easier to place if you sold them than if you gave them away; somehow, to my mother's eternal amazement, my grandmother succeeded in selling out every litter.

* * * * *

Sharing!

My mother always claimed not to like pets very much but anyone who watched her with them knew better. (Not that we children could believe anyone could possibly dislike the little guys. It wasn’t till I was an adult with kids of my own that I learned how much work they could be, especially dogs, even if you adored them. Guess who sheltered me from that knowledge!)

One dog-related task that I always participated in enthusiastically, however, was a regular Saturday morning session that somehow turned into a bizarre father-daughter bonding ritual. No one had ever heard of Lyme disease then - perhaps it wasn't even a recognized diagnosis yet - but living at the Jersey Shore meant lots and lots of ticks, and the ones we knew best were dog ticks. When the season started in the Spring, my father filled a glass jelly jar with kerosene and then sat on the cellar stairs with a dog between his knees, tweezers in hand and his daughter at his side, watching with abject fascination. As the season wore on, the jar would become filled, with both the athletic little black ones that had barely had a chance to latch on and the large bloated white ones that had been gorging on dog blood for days. By the end of the season my father would happily display his trophy collection to anyone unwary enough to feign an interest in the process.

* * * * *

Of course we had a succession of nameless fish and turtles, but can you call a box turtle a pet? Every summer we found a few good-sized box turtles lumbering along the roadside - easily distinguished from their surly snapping cousins by their much sweeter faces and dispositions. We kept them in a box for a few days, painting our initials on their backs and feeding them lettuce, then released them and waited to see if they would return the following year. That seldom happened - though I once found one with someone else's initials!

Other non-pets included the fireflies we kept in jars by our bedside, watching dreamily as they lit up the room after dark.

Beyond that, my many rather elaborate efforts to catch and adopt wildlife were uniformly unsuccessful. For some reason a squirrel was at the top of my wish list. No one ever explained to me that our pets were bred to be infantilized, and that wild animals could not readily be tamed; or if anyone did I didn't listen.

* * * * *

One of my all-time favorite pets was Archie the parakeet. Parakeets (or budgerigars) are small parrots living wild in the drier regions of Australia. They have been bred in captivity since the 1850s, but for some reason a parakeet craze swept the nation in the 1950s and early 1960s. Our Asbury Park Woolworth’s was literally atwitter with colorful creatures awaiting adoption - green (the wild type, like Archie), but also blue and yellow and white that had been bred for variety. I longed for a parakeet the moment I saw their comical little faces, and since in our house longing was usually the prelude to receiving, sure enough, the coveted cage awaited me on Christmas morning.

How I loved Archie!

Although we were familiar enough with marine creatures, birds had never before been part of our family menagerie, so without warning I was introduced to the mysteries of cuttlebone, sandpaper tubes to cover perches, how to hand-feed a parakeet without getting pecked, and (less alluring) the weekly cage cleaning requirement.

But what really excited me was that you could supposedly teach your parakeet to talk. Forget about canaries; I wanted my bird to converse with me, not serenade me. Unfortunately, either Archie wasn’t the brightest budgie in the flock, or more likely we weren't systematic enough to train him properly. For whatever reason, we never succeeded in turning Archie into much of a raconteur.

He did, however, have one notable verbal accomplishment. In those days when you wanted to make a telephone call, you picked up the receiver and the operator (a real human, and always a woman) said “Number, please.” Almost all our numbers began with “Asbury Park two,” the local exchange, followed by four additional digits that uniquely specified the recipient. Archie’s cage hung right over the telephone, and Archie became quite adept at saying the three little words he heard most often, “Asbury Park two.”

Sadly, Archie came to a bad end at the claws of one of our mama cats. I was devastated and insisted on wearing a black armband to school.

* * * * *

The invention of kitty litter in 1947 by a man named Edward Lowe changed cat ownership forever, in ways that went far beyond which side of the door the cat spent the night on. Before kitty litter, cats were workers who earned their keep by keeping rodents at bay; since kitty litter they have become fur babies who, if we’re lucky, curl up with us at night.

In my childhood home and I'm sure in many other homes of the late 1940s and early 1950s, however, this new invention hadn't quite caught on yet. I also don’t remember the practice of routinely neutering male cats, though females were generally spayed. Consequently, there was no such thing then as what we would now call an indoor cat, and life with a tom involved a lot of patching up.

So it was with John Timothy McGoldrick, son of one of the many Orrie's and a wondrous beast with totally contrasting outdoor and indoor personalities. Outdoors, birds feared him, and rightly so. Indoors, he drooled like a baby and happily let Archie perch on his head, purring all the while.

He did, however, have a disconcerting habit of disappearing for days at a time, and as he grew older his absences grew longer. The day my parents finally left the house on Pinewood Drive to move to Long Island, Goldie was nowhere to be found. All the neighbors were asked to watch for Goldie and notify us immediately if he turned up, but he never did.

2 Comments

<<Previous

CINDY STODOLA POMERLEAU

I was just shy of 3 years old when the US Army successfully bounced radar waves off the moon - the opening salvo in the Space Race, the birth of radioastronomy, and the first Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) communication. I was born on the Jersey coast for the same reason as Project Diana: my father, as scientific director of the Project, was intimately involved in both events. Like Project Diana, I was named for the goddess of the moon (in my case Cynthia, the Greeks' nickname for Artemis - their version of Diana - who was born on Mt Cynthos). Project Diana is baked into my DNA.

CONNECT WITH CINDY
Facebook: @cynthia.s.pomerleau
Twitter: @Cindy_Pomerleau

EMAIL SUBSCRIPTION
Send me your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive email notifications of new posts.

TO THE MOON AND BACK

CINDY STODOLA POMERLEAU

Archives

Categories